Ya gal is back

Welcome back to Pretty Empty Pockets. Ya gal is back for an unpredictable amount of time.

After a 6 month Hiatus I’m back to share with you my wonderful wit general charm.

Kidding I’m actually here to make you do the one thing we all hate to believe we’re capable of doing these days:

Think. Ugh.

After a reminder that my blog turned 2 a few weeks ago, I felt the sudden urge to get back to writing. A quick check on insta, and it seemed the majority of you guys were ready to welcome me back, while I sided with the one person who didn’t feel it was a great idea.

It’s very easy to sit here and write about what I found in my bag, what I bought at Primark, or list a few places I want to go in the world.

But for fashion content to work, two things need to happen:

⁃ I actually have to locate my bank card

⁃ I then have to spend the money on the bank card while holding back my cheapskate tears.

The other thing? I don’t feel any emotional connection to that sort of thing.

If I don’t become connected with the writing, and if I don’t believe in it 100% after 17 proofreads, it doesn’t make the cut.

And it’s not just that. Because there’s so many people to compare yourself to these days; ‘I’m not getting as many likes as her, my followers aren’t growing, I don’t get paid work, why do they?’, it’s very clear that a blog can’t just be a space where you can write out your thoughts and feelings – it has to be a market place too. I’m not one to complain about more dollar, but success is so hard to achieve in a saturated market place, that any failure feels 100 times worse.

2017 was a royal shitshow in the end. And I found my blog wasn’t the right place to unpack that. Honestly, I didn’t really find a place; but I knew here wasn’t a space to start writing about all I was thinking, or how I was feeling. So here I am, 8 months later, ready to use it all to create some content. Writing is much better in retrospect; with a steady mind and typing hands to match.

I just found myself writing to pretend I was okay. But 4 days into my travel diary of Dubai, I just suddenly realised it was break time.

And not the good kind with snacks and skipping. More the getting rid of anything that made me feel anxious and sad, or even happy and comfortable kind. I removed toxic friends, removed myself from all of my friend groups and dove deep into the pit of Netflix.

Writing provided more anxiety than it did peace. It was no longer about writing out how I felt to remind others they weren’t alone: I needed to know I wasn’t alone for once. I needed to know I was going to be okay.

It’s a huge insecurity; putting yourself in this online space where anyone and their pet can look (although if you have pets of the fluffy kind, you are always welcome), and when nobody ends up engaging, it’s almost as if a whole world of connected people didn’t care about anything you had to say.

Let’s just say I have rejection issues… a seen message with no reply is enough to end my friendship or throw my phone at a wall. And an ignored Snapchat could truly make me want to burn things.

Rejection is one of my biggest fears and my biggest trigger. And you can bet I will continue you but you to pick your brain about why you’re ignoring me…I’m a gem.

So the rejection of a whole online community? Being just a small voice in a big screaming world is really too much to handle. So to have even the smallest, tiniest, minute droplet of doubt in my mind – that people might not care or dislike my content – really rocks the boat.

Mental health, discussion pieces and thought provoking content can’t be written in a tiny tweet or a caption on a photo, which is why I find myself toying with the idea of opening my mind again and scrawling it down on the notepads of the Internet.

So I’m bringing it back to basics. I’m going to focus on writing and bring back my flair. As long as there’s somebody to listen.

Meanwhile, I shall *try* to create shopping content that is heavily based on my instagram. Fashion, homewares and my favourite websites. There’ll be round ups from time to time on the blog too.

Ya gal needs to find her feet. And when she’s found them, but on some sparkly unicorn socks and a fab pair of plimsolls and get cracking.